Character Analysis: The Screwtape Letters

The Screwtape Letters is a very important to me. It gives me the insight of how the devil does things to try to lure my soul into hell. It teaches me that some things that I may do are not necessarily good for me and my Christian lifestyle. Throughout this essay I will be citing examples from the book on how the evil uses the appearance of the good to further its aims. This book contains letters written by a demon named, Screwtape, who writes letters to his nephew, Wormwood, explaining on how to capture the soul of the good. The soul they are trying to capture is on the patient. The patient is a new Christian, he is continually having doubts and going back and forth between doing good things and bad. One of the earliest examples of evil exploited

By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result?” This basically means by the patient arguing it can allow the patient to attend universal problems and make the patient lure away from the stream of his current experiences. Arguing is not beneficial for the demons, they despise arguments and does not want the patient to be entertained by the act of arguing. Everyone knows that prayer is power; prayer is when a person is communicating with the man above about a blessing or a dramatic problem. In letter 4, Screwtape and Wormwood emerges in the conversation about how prayer is not good when trying to capture the patient’s soul. On page number, (15 and 16), Screwtape tells Wormwood, “The best thing, where it is possible, is to keep the patient from the serious intention of praying altogether. When the patient is an adult recently reconverted to the Enemy’s party, like your man, this is best done by encouraging him to remember, or to think he remembers, the parrot-like nature of his prayers in childhood. In reaction against that, he may be persuaded to aim at something entirely spontaneous, inward, informal, and unregularised; and what this will actually mean to a beginner will be an effort to produce in himself a vaguely devotional

After feeling that prayer is no help, the patient will then try to look in another direction for help. If Worwood fails to keep the patient away from prayer, Screwtape has a fall back plan that can also be good for the demons. If the patient continues to pray, Wormwood has to keep the patient away from thinking of God and the right things, but to turn prayer around and let it be just about himself. On page (16), Screwtape tells Wormwood, “Whenever they are attending to the Enemy himself we are defeated, but there are ways of preventing them from doing so. The simplest is to turn their gaze away from Him towards themselves. Keep them watching their own minds and trying to produce feelings there by the action of their own wills.” This basically means when they think they are praying for something good and particular; he has to manufacture their feelings into praying for the total opposite. You have to capture the mind before you can capture the soul. One other example that caught my eye is when, Screwtape describes that keeping the patient from thinking about the present and think about eternity. By having the patient concerned with eternity, it allows him to think about God. On page (76), Screwtape said, “It is far better to make